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There is a growing literature about the international community’s ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (r2p) vulnerable populations against mass atrocities, but more is needed to demonstrate the potential of principled negotiation strategies to improve the quality of r2p outcomes. Proponents of the r2p principle base their arguments on the primacy of protecting human life against mass atrocities. Opponents claim national state sovereignty and non-intervention norms must be upheld. This norm contestation often leads to a situation where r2p is either not implemented or military interventions are conducted as a last resort. From an ethical and human rights perspective, both extremes are suboptimal to prevent and reduce human suffering. This article argues that to avoid both extremes, more effective negotiation strategies are needed. An analytical framework is offered that can guide policymakers in their quest to protect human life with peaceful and humanitarian means focusing on prevention under already existing r2p mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nearly two decades after its formal endorsement by the international community, the Responsibility to Protect is stuck in a quagmire reminiscent of the contentious politics that both preceded and precipitated it. A once ambitious effort to transform notions of responsibility and practices of accountability regarding civilian protection and atrocity prevention, R2P has stagnated to such a degree that some have dismissed it as a dead letter. This research diagnoses the primary cause of that stagnation while also proposing a way forward for resuscitating R2P's normative aims, via a return to R2P's origins as an accountability mechanism for the provision of human rights and security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The peace process between the Philippine government and the separatist Moro Islamic Liberation Front provided breathing space for many communities and opportunities for calibrated civilian protection practices by the military and non-governmental organisations (NGO s). While the principle of non-intervention largely kept the imprint of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to a minimum, Indonesian and Malaysian brokering enabled the establishment of bridging mechanisms such as ceasefire monitoring committees to moderate the armed violence. A more permissive environment allowed NGO s to deliver humanitarian aid and acquire improved capacities for risk mitigation in the Bangsamoro region, aided in part by a shift in the Philippine military's approach toward putting a premium on civilian consultation and dialogue. Despite these normative gains, the uptick in horizontal violence among rival clans and the military's preference for the use of artillery fire as a conflict de-escalation strategy create enduring challenges for civilian protection on the ground. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the end of the Cold War, and especially since the adoption of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, third party military interventions are only justified in cases of large-scale human rights violations. However, the number of military interventions did not decrease since 1989. A large-N study is done to measure the effect of third party military interventions since 1989 on core human right practices. It is argued that five years after an intervention takes place, there will be less physical harm to citizens. However, the effect on political rights appears to be diminishing. In addition, to contribute to the discussion as to who should intervene, an analysis about the intervener's political system is included in this article. The results impose important questions and debates, both about the intentions and effects of foreign troops intervening in a conflict, as the conceptualization and cultural debate with regard to human rights violations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Civilian-Led Prevention and Protection against Atrocity Crimes 313 I Felicity Gray i Mass Atrocities in Ethiopia and Myanmar: The Case for "Harm Mitigation" in R2P Implementation 339 I Patrick Wight and Yuriko Cowper-Smith i Volume 14, No. 4 Notes on Contributors 381 B RESEARCH ARTICLES b Consequentialism - Deontology Theorising, Armed Humanitarian Intervention, and the 2012-2013 Central African Republic Crisis 383 I Nicholas Idris Erameh and Victor Ojakorotu i Afghanistan's Forgotten Boys: Legal Pluralism and Impunity 409 I Stacey Henderson and Leonie Muller i A Murderous Plague: State Hypermasculinity, COVID-19, and Atrocity Prevention in the Philippines 432 I Maria Tanyag i B BOOK REVIEWS b I France, Humanitarian Intervention and the Responsibility to Protect i by Eglantine Staunton 463 I Reviewed by Daniel R. Brunstetter i I Existing Legal Limits to Security Council Veto Power in the Face of Atrocity Crimes i by Jennifer Trahan 466 I Reviewed by Roger S. Clark i I The Responsibility to Protect in Darfur: From Forgotten Conflict to Global Cause and Back i by David Lanz 469 I Reviewed by Jess Gifkins i. [Extracted from the article]

Despite the challenges that have greeted Responsibility to Protect (R2P) interventions in Africa, the need to authorise R2P remains compelling. Drawing from secondary sources, this study interrogates the R2P intervention in the Central African Republic (CAR) from within the frame of the 'consequentialism' and 'deontology' debate, contending issues, and the extent to which such interventions enhance or inhibit further institutionalisation of the doctrine. Though the existing peacekeeping mission – which was further amplified by the mobilisation of R2P via UN Security Council Resolution 2127 – reflects the deontological position of halting attacks against the civilian population, the emerging issues and relapse into deadly conflicts in the post-intervention era amplifies consequentialism's main criticisms. The study concludes that the R2P experience in CAR highlights the value of both theoretical positions. However, it is imperative for the consequentialist position to strengthen its arguments for civilian protection by considering the moral argument of the deontologist. This is key to improving armed intervention through the phases of planning, implementation, and post-intervention for the purposes of achieving sustainable peace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since protest movements had swept the Middle East and North Africa regions in early 2011, new politics have emerged, creating unimagined spaces, ways of existence and knowing the world, and more importantly, new subcultures of othering. This article critically examines revolutionary subcultures of non-comradeship, figurations of 'non-authentic revolutionaries' and ways of revolutionary othering by focusing on the term ' Ramadyeen ' as a reference coined by Syrian revolutionaries to describe individuals whose politics are 'not revolutionary enough'. Written from the positionality of a scholar-activist who participated in the protest movement, this text employs anti-sectarian feminist politics to reflect on how ' Ramadyeen ' was mobilized to erase and decrease voices of nuances and criticism of dominant revolutionary demands, specifically around humanitarian intervention, militarization and sanctions against Syria. Therefore, this article locates ' Ramadayeen ' as a keyword of counter-cultures targeting 'un-revolutionary' people and political positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the role of intersubjective and situated meanings and norm contestation for militarised humanitarian interventions from a critical perspective. The International Relations (ir) literature on humanitarian interventions, the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, and emergence of norms is explained and critically evaluated. The case analysed here is Turkey and its foreign policy discourse regarding interventions in Libya and Syria. Based on the case and literature review, the author concludes that critical approaches particularly provide useful tools to understand the role of identity, changing foreign policy narratives, and power constellations in world politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This piece examines the place of the use of force in R2P. It shows that a sceptical view about the use of force to protect populations, a view guided by the seemingly 'endless wars' of the global 'war on terror' and the troubled legacy of intervention in Libya, has become predominant. The principle's earliest advocates went to considerable lengths to distinguish it from the bad old days of 'humanitarian intervention' in part to assuage fears and in part to burnish R2P's apparent novelty. However, experience shows that in the face of determined perpetrators force, with all the problems that entails, sometimes is necessary to protect from populations. This piece suggests the need to bring the use of force back in to debates about implementing R2P [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current discussion on R2P at the UN is largely ahistorical or at most informed by selective historical references, which exclude earlier forms of intervention aimed at atrocity prevention, particularly by states in the global South. This contribution argues that the result is a skewed understanding of the practice of intervention that serves to deny agency to actors outside of the West and undermines the framing of atrocity prevention and R2P as an issue of global concern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of military force abroad is a significant part of some states' counter-terrorist efforts. Can these operations be ethically justified? This paper considers whether the underlying principles that philosophers have put forward to justify humanitarian interventions (which may underlie the international norm of the responsibility to protect (R2P)) can also give support for foreign counter-terrorist interventions of this sort. While it finds that the limits to international action that are imposed by the need to respect state sovereignty do not rule out counter-terrorist interventions, it urges caution in supporting an international norm permitting them. Because such a norm would be open to manipulation and abuse, it may be preferable to discourage appealing to it in order to justify military counter-terrorism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

(Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2020), isbn 9781107061927, 539 pp, GBP 85 HB Lately, the notion of humanitarian intervention as a foreign policy tool has triggered fresh debate and has divided the world between global geopolitical north and south.[1] To understand the roots of this schism, it is pivotal to revisit the origins of this notion. Swatek-Evenstein contends that the two major factors influencing humanitarian intervention were religion and national interest; the larger object of these interventions was to spread the civilising mission. According to Swatek-Evenstein, 'India is a rarity among Asian countries in widely adopting the Eurocentric narrative of the legality of "humanitarian intervention" in classic international law' (p 229). [Extracted from the article]

The 2018 United Nations Security Council Resolution 2417 makes a significant contribution to the growing normative framework that is considering famines as subjects of global peace and security. The Resolution's limits and blind spots in connection with non-state armed groups, the use of human shields, and the politics of humanitarian intervention are raised and discussed in this essay. The current armed conflict and risk of famine in Ethiopia is used an example for these discussions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

France strongly supported the R2P principles and ensured that, on the global stage, R2P "was being debated and implemented by the international community" (p.120). [Extracted from the article]

Russia's use of force in Ukraine has been described as a challenge to the rule of international law and an event of unilateral intervention. This paper provides a reinterpretation of this standard history of Russian revisionism. Our new history places this practice in a global governance context through an analysis of the politics concerning the international legal norm of 'non-intervention' and its legitimate/illegitimate exceptions for collective intervention. This analysis discloses a practice of Russian diplomacy that emerges out of resistance to humanitarian interventions advocated for by Western states. This practice justifies its own state-bound humanitarian intervention as the legitimate exception to the foundation of international order, which Russian diplomacy had previously sought to restore. We argue the political discourse of the worldview of 'state civilization' explains these events of Russian revisionism. We conclude with an analysis of the international paradoxes of peace and conflict contingent on this Russian worldview. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In today's conflicts, the number of people needing physical protection is at an all-time high. Often, protection is provided by the creation of safe areas. Although the notion largely disappeared after the Srebrenica genocide, safe areas have continued to exist empirically. Recently, safe areas had a minor revival in academic analysis and in the political rhetoric vis-à-vis Syria. Yet, fundamental gaps remain as it is still unclear what a safe area actually is and whether all safe areas function in the same way. This article develops a precise definition and comprehensive typology of safe areas. The definition is based on considerations regarding geographical limitation and location, target group, kind of provided protection, involved actors, and effective existence. Furthermore, four ideal types of safe areas are identified based on a division between belligerents' consent/international presence and different geographical sizes. This is complemented by an extensive collection of empirical cases since 1900. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of a Grotian moment remains rather obscure in international law. On the one hand, it can refer simply to an empirical fact which galvanises the ordinary law-making processes, whether treaty-making or State practice, resulting in major shifts in international law. On the other hand, a Grotian moment might be seen as an event so significant that it results in an extraordinary shift in international law without full adherence to the processes for law-making. The former understanding has little legal significance, while the latter, which would be legally significant, would be controversial and without legal basis. Against this background the article discusses the intersections between peremptory norms and Grotian Moments. It does this by looking at the intersection between the two concepts as well as the intersection between Grotian Moments, on the one hand and, on the other hand, particular jus cogens norms. With respect to the former, for example, the article will consider whether the high threshold of peremptory status facilitates and hinders Grotian moments. With respect to the latter, the article will consider particular norms that have been said to have shifted on account of the Grotian moments, namely the right to use of force in self-defence as well humanitarian intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a normative account of legitimate humanitarian intervention. Presenting a pragmatic and ideologically neutral standard for intervention, it repositions humanitarian intervention within the context of its two most closely related practices: Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and liberal intervention. While distinct from R2P, humanitarian intervention is not in conflict with this political commitment. A consistent application of humanitarian intervention would indeed strengthen R2P. On the other hand, this normative account also distinguishes the principle of legitimate humanitarian intervention from the problematic conflation with liberal intervention. Liberal intervention reflects the more expansive project of international social engineering and 'liberal hegemony' pursued by the United States and its principle allies since the end of the Cold War. By clarifying the distinction between humanitarian intervention and liberal intervention, this revised standard overcomes several obstacles emerging from their conceptual confusion. It crafts a normatively acceptable standard for intervention which can garner broad international support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a comparative analysis of the legal grounds for the deployment of the Russian Armed Forces in a series of conflicts in the Caucasus, namely in the disengagement between North Ossetia and Ingushetia (1992–1994), South Ossetia/Georgia (1992–2008), Abkhazia/Georgia (1994–2008), and in the Russian–Georgian War of 2008. The difficulties in codifying certain actions from the point of view of international law are detailed. The article discusses whether the political and military actions of Moscow in various Caucasian conflicts were driven and interconnected by one and the same logic, or were purely ad hoc fixes. Cases where Russia's actions have been legitimized by securing mandate from a regional intergovernmental organization are differentiated from cases where it has acted on the basis of intergovernmental agreements, as well as from the application in certain cases of Article 51 ("the right of individual or collective self-defence") of the UN Charter. The legitimacy or illegitimacy of the deployment of the Russian Armed Forces abroad is considered in the context of, and in comparison with, a series of cases where force has been used in conflicts by coalitions under a UN mandate, as well as by NATO and some Western powers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Will the rise of China, an authoritarian, party-state with a poor record of protecting its citizens' human rights, undermine humanitarian intervention? This question has been particularly pertinent since China's "assertive turn" in foreign policy. Drawing on the case of Chinese reactions to the humanitarian crisis in Syria, this article argues that China's attitude toward humanitarian intervention remains ambiguous and contradictory. While China has at times prevented the UN Security Council from threatening sanctions on Syria, it has not necessarily denied that a humanitarian crisis exists. The article shows that the People's Republic of China is beginning to act more as a norm maker than norm taker, and is offering its own vision of humanitarian intervention, coined as "responsible protection." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While images of boats in distress, overflowing with migrants in the Central Mediterranean, flash on television screens and front pages of Italian and European newspapers, search and rescue (SAR) missions continue to draw attention. This article takes a look at migratory flows across the Central Mediterranean from 2012 to 2018 and focuses on the response of governmental, inter-governmental, and non-governmental actors rescuing lives at sea. Using aggregate data on migrants' sea arrivals and deaths as well as official documents from the UNHRC, the European Union, Italy's Ministry of Interior, and NGOs, this study investigates 1) how different actors have responded to migratory flows across the Central Mediterranean, and 2) how actors' narratives and response have impacted the situation at sea. The study finds that, although all three actors act on the humanitarian principle 'to save lives,' their narratives and response diverge as the intensity of sea arrivals persists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

R2P is the international community's organising principle for responding to mass atrocity crimes. It reflected and contributed to the shift from power towards norms as the pivot on which history turns. The old, discredited and discarded 'humanitarian intervention' represents the national interest and power end of the intervention spectrum. R2P is an effort to insert the global justice and normative end and has much better prospects of a convergence of legality and legitimacy in the use of force. It will be easier to prevent unilateral use of force by great powers if their interventionist instincts are moderated by the discipline of multilateral norms. R2P has a secure future because it is demand-driven. On the realism side of the ledger, many leaders rule on the basis of brute force and occasionally will commit atrocities. On the normative side, the better angels of most people in many countries will demand effective and timely action by governments and the UN to halt the atrocities and punish the perpetrators. R2P is the answer to the challenge of global justice being done and being seen to be done, both by states as the primary units of the global order but also by peoples in whom sovereignty ultimately resides. And it does so by reconciling several inherent tensions between competing interests, competing values, and competing interests and values: between the UN Security Council and the General Assembly; between human and national security; between states and the international community; between institutionalised indifference and unilateral intervention; and between the global North and South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the end of the Cold War, Iraq has faced three international interventions. While their humanitarian component was a secondary – and at times, arguable – factor, they all played a central role in normative debates on the extent to which states should protect populations from mass atrocities beyond their borders (and what that actually entails), making Iraq a central piece of the human protection puzzle. In addition to analysing how Iraq's fate has played a key part in the development of human protection over the years, the article argues that France had a central role in both the interventions and the normative debates they generated, and investigates its role in depth. By doing so, it deepens our understanding of human protection, France's foreign policy and Iraq's development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The practice of humanitarian military action has changed markedly in the 21st century when compared with the 1990s. This essay explores three broad trends that have shaped this evolution. First, the UN has adopted the protection of civilians as a central element of its agenda and as a guiding principle for reforming its peace operations and its responses to atrocities such as genocide and ethnic cleansing. Second, major powers have played a central role as belligerents or patrons of belligerents in many of the worst conflicts of the last two decades. And third, the wealthy Western states with the greatest resources and military capabilities for ambitious humanitarian operations have substantially reduced their direct contributions to these missions. Together, these developments have shifted the balance of responsibility and effort for humanitarian military operations toward the UN and developing countries; constrained the ambitions of these missions; limited what they can accomplish and contributed to gaps between the expectations they create and the protection they are able to deliver; and discouraged meaningful action in response to many of the century's most devastating conflicts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Miliary intervention remains a controversial part of human protection. Indispensable in some circumstances, military intervention confronts significant structural challenges which means that it is used only rarely and has the propensity for causing unintended negative consequences. In this essay, we examine the place of humanitarian intervention within the human protection regime. Focusing on the case of Libya, we argue that the UN Security Council has now accepted that the use force, even against a sovereign state, is a sometimes legitimate response to mass atrocities. But the Libya experience also raised three major challenges – challenges of regime change, accountability, and selectivity – that will have be addressed if military intervention is ever to become a legitimate part of international society's anti-atrocities arsenal. First, we show how increased international activism after the Cold War helped put downwards pressure on the incidence of mass atrocities worldwide. Second, we explain why armed intervention remained a controversial and rarely employed instrument of human protection. Third, we argue that the UN Security Council's decision to authorise armed intervention in Libya represented a significant development in the place of armed intervention as a tool of human protection. Finally, we examine the political consequences of the intervention and argue that these will need to be addressed in order to rebuild sufficient trust to allow future considerations of the use of force for humanitarian purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bringing into focus the two formal debates on the Responsibility to Protect that took place in 2009 and 2018, this article identifies the approaches of member states towards the humanitarian use of force by locating it in the UN's deliberations on R2P. To this end, the article compares and contrasts country statements in order to trace states' general approach towards humanitarian intervention on the basis of their reflections on R2P. Following from this, the article examines whether or not states' approaches to humanitarian intervention have been transforming in the twenty-first century, and evaluates how the humanitarian use of force is perceived in relation to the R2P framework that was embraced by the member states of the UN General Assembly in 2005, and how this affects the future of R2P. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite worries about paternalism, when we are unjustifiably attacked, we are morally warranted, and sometimes required, to act in self-defense for the sake of our attacker to prevent him from committing this morally defiling act. Similarly, when a third party is unjustifiably attacked and we can assist without undue cost, we are morally warranted, and sometimes required, to act in third-party defense for the sake of the attacker as well as the victim, to prevent the attacker from committing this morally defiling act. The case for these claims can be extended to national defense and humanitarian intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article expounds the role played by Hugo Grotius in marginalizing positive duties for the protection of vulnerable people beyond the sovereign state. In the sixteenth century, theorists writing within a range of traditions had posited solemn and demanding duties to assist and rescue vulnerable subjects of other rulers from tyranny and persecution. In the early seventeenth century, Grotius explicitly subordinated such duties to the duty to seek the preservation and advantage of one's own state. He claimed that, while the care of the vulnerable subjects of others was praiseworthy, it was not obligatory. No state was bound to accept trouble or inconvenience for the sake of vulnerable outsiders. Grotius turns out to be less of an exemplar for present day notions of the Responsibility to Protect and other international duties of human protection than he is often said to be. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates how selfish justifications enter cosmopolitan rationales in the political plane of the discourse. It makes sense of the ways in which selfish ideas are allowed to meddle in and merge with morally-based cosmopolitan norms. The article commits to the ontological and epistemological premises of critical discourse analysis, and focuses on US presidential papers since 1989. It substantiates the claims it makes by using computer-assisted discursive process tracing method as a supporting tool for qualitative analysis of texts. The computerised analysis of discursive entanglements reveals that cosmopolitan protective operations are in fact mainly framed nationalistically. The roots of such selfish nationalistic arguments for international protective military operations can be traced in the realist and hegemonic fallacies that emphasise the naturality of national selfishness and the need for global hegemony. Furthermore, the article shows how the entanglement of discourse strands about 'protection' and 'innocent victimhood' as well as the entanglement between 'crime prevention' and 'terrorism prevention' legitimate selfish internationalist arguments in the US political debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the intellectual context and conceptual foundations of R2P. Michael Walzer reinitiated debates about humanitarian intervention by grounding sovereignty and non-intervention in individual human rights and communal autonomy (self-determination). Liberal cosmopolitan critics of Walzer highlighted the tension between these two values, and proposed that sovereignty should rather be grounded in individual rights and democratic self-determination. In the post-Cold War era, international lawyers and international relations scholars came to endorse the idea that state sovereignty is qualified by the most basic human rights. High ranking UN officials further proposed that state sovereignty should be redefined as the sovereignty of the people, which, however, was seen as coextensive with the protection of the fundamental individual rights, and as such could be shared by the 'international community'. R2P adopted a similar approach, glossing over the potential tensions between sovereignty, self-determination and human rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Safe areas established by powerful states can improve short-term civilian protection during ethnic civil wars. Paradoxically, however, they may worsen the plight of vulnerable civilians over the medium term. This can occur in three ways. First, when safe areas encompass sizeable territories within a broader conflict zone, they may reduce incentives for protected groups to compromise during peace negotiations, thus prolonging hostilities. Second, there is a nontrivial possibility that protected groups will use the safe areas as a base for launching high-risk offensives, deliberately putting civilians at risk in the hope of drawing the protection forces more deeply into the war. Third, safe areas may embolden protected groups to seek unilateral secession, further increasing the risk of conflict escalation. By elucidating the causal mechanisms involved, this article helps us assess the probability of these outcomes occurring. States that consider intervening militarily to establish safe areas in ethnic civil wars need to weigh the short-term benefits against these possible longer-term downsides. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internationally proclaimed safe areas do not aim to end ongoing wars. Instead, their more limited goal is to create islands of temporary refuge where threatened civilians can find shelter. As intuitively compelling as the idea of safe areas may seem, however, it raises numerous practical and ethical questions. The articles in this special issue draw on history, moral philosophy and political science in order to assess whether safe areas are indeed an appropriate response to humanitarian crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this piece, Henderson looks to the shadow of Rwanda in terms of the concept of humanitarian intervention, and the evolution of the R2P doctrine. Tracing the re-examination of the conceptualisations of sovereignty and the principle of non-intervention that evolved after Rwanda, Henderson assesses the legal, normative, and institutional challenges that still attend the attainment of its goals. Henderson concludes on a note of cautious optimism: Although it is in no way a panacea, R2P – at the very least – raises the possibility that a greater range of measures may be taken in response to the commission, or anticipation of, atrocity crimes in the future. The legacy of Rwanda is the hope, reflected in R2P, that silence and idleness will never again be the international community's response to genocide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

His research interests are African Politics, Nigeria, Conflict and Peace, Environmental Politics and Security. I Nicholas Idris Erameh i is a lecturer at the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Chrisland University, Abeokuta, Ogun State, Nigeria, and is currently a Post-doctoral Fellow at the Department of Political Studies and International Relations at North West University, Mafikeng, South Africa. I Victor Ojakorotu i is currently the Deputy Director, School of Government Studies, Mafikeng at North West University, Mafikeng, South Africa. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses the legal requirements for military intervention and for humanitarian assistance in Libya. It mentions the instability of the African country and the risk of increased terrorist activities on Libyan soil carried a significant weight in the reports of the Italian executive in front of the Italian Parliament.

The article discusses that Italian position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, along with mentions the parliamentary motions adopted by the Italian Parliament on the recognition of the Palestinian State in 2015. It discusses the efforts focusing on the protection of the cultural heritage by the UNESCO.

The text explores the legacy of Professor Krzysztof Skubiszewski on the use of force with special focus on his contribution to the 1969 Manual of Public International Law edited by Professor Max Sorensen, which still serves as a reference in contemporary scholarship. Firstly, an attempt to identify Professor Skubiszewski's approach to the use of force problems is made. It is claimed that the main feature which makes this approach still attractive is perceivingy'us ad bellum in a systemic way. The remaining parts of the text take this approach as a starting point for dealing with contemporaryjus ad bellum challenges. Two examples are particularly focused on in this respect: the problem of humanitarian intervention and the challenged inter-State paradigm of the use of force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores humanitarian interventions during the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century and their impact on the refinement of the Family of Nations concept. The legal doctrines on intervention in Europe are examined and the military and collective interventions in the empire due to the violence that arose from authorities' counterinsurgency campaigns. Also discussed are legal scholars' views on the intervention and lawyers' role in influencing the Family of Nations.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the consequences of humanitarian interventions in the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century, the 1897 Battle of Navarino, and the history of private international law.

Fernando Téson argues: “Human beings have claims against their own states and governments that the international community cannot merely ignore.”1 Claims which are founded on rights and their protection have become the foundation for a radical new formulation of the concept of sovereignty, as contained in the Responsibility to Protect Report of 2001. This new concept of sovereignty also lays down a new threshold for when to intervene, in order to protect civilian populations from, inter alia, brutal oppression and mass murder. However, is this new threshold sufficient to guarantee effective intervention? Can this new norm of responsibility be grounded in the different sovereign polities around the world? In this article, I attempt to examine the ideological matrix or discourse in which this new norm was founded, and explore its shortcomings when applied to different conceptualisations of sovereign polity. Further, I shall attempt to argue for a more inclusive threshold, one which can be applied more effectively to different situations and different polities which require intervention efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I challenge the argument presented by Tim Dunne and Katherine Gelber in 'Arguing Matters: The Responsibility to Protect and the Case of Libya' (Global Responsibility to Protect vol. 6, iss. 3, 2014). I argue that the evidence supplied by Dunne and Gelber to support their argument that the Responsibility to Protect played a role in the debate on the international response to the crisis in Libya is based on an unsustainable expansion of what constitutes RtoP language, fails to acknowledge the historical evolution of human rights-orientated discourse, and exaggerates the extent to which references were made to RtoP during the debates preceding Resolution 1973. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assuming an international commitment to intervene in severe and urgent humanitarian emergencies, as expressed by the doctrine 'The Responsibility to Protect', I discuss two objections that the duty to intervene is nonetheless a duty that is easily limited by other moral considerations. One objection is that this duty will exceed the reasonable limits of any obligation given the high personal cost of intervention. The other objection is that any duty to intervene will be an imperfect duty, and therefore not a duty that is ascribed to and demandable of any specific actor. I will argue that these objections do not undermine the principle of the responsibility to protect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The creation of the responsibility to protect doctrine reformulated the historical notion of humanitarian intervention. The new doctrine was centered around the principle of nonintervention, a basic precept of the U.N. Charter system, with its initial report explicitly excluding regime change disguised as humanitarian intervention as external to the scope of the doctrine. Military intervention was only to be the means of last resort after the exhaustion of several preliminary mechanisms. In its implementation, the broad mandate of the responsibility to protect has been harshly criticized because it opens the possibility for powerful States, often seeking regime change, to interfere in the domestic affairs of weaker States. This article will first discuss (I) the chronology and evolution of the doctrine, (II) situating it in the context of the U.N. Charter prohibition on the use of force and articulating its nonbinding nature. It will then examine (III) the cases of Libya and Syria, focusing on the initial decision to intervene and how the dissemination of misinformation has served to promote military interventions where they would otherwise be considered illegitimate. The article will conclude with a brief discussion of (IV) how the international community can move beyond misapplication and seek to limit its abuse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the Australian practice in international relations and laws in the year 2012. Topic discussed include treaties and agreement made by Australia with other countries; the country's views on humanitarian intervention of Mali; Australia's stand for the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Law of the Sea and the UN's Assistance Mission in Afghanistan.

This article analyses international negotiations over the 2011 Libyan crisis during the short weeks between the start of the uprising and the passage and implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1973. We make two arguments: first, following Risse, we demonstrate how and when argumentation around the humanitarian norm of protecting civilians mattered in these debates; second, we show that failure on the part of the supporters of the intervention on humanitarian grounds to maintain consistent and genuine argumentation in relation to that mandate is a key factor in explaining the subsequent lack of agreement about collective action inside the Security Council. We conclude that the lesson that arguing mattered in relation to Libya has been insufficiently appreciated, but needs to be better understood in order to facilitate the future traction of the RtoP norm in international negotiations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay revisits the relationship between Article 4(h) of the African Union Constitutive Act and the R2P concept with a particular focus on military intervention. After unfolding the narrative of equation between the two norms, we explore their content and highlight their clear differences. We also observe the conceptual glissement concerning Article 4(h) from a right to a duty to intervene, which is not backed up by international practice. Furthermore, we examine the possible impact of the narrative of equation on the use of force architecture and particularly, on the relationship between the African Union and the United Nations. Finally, we analyse the normative implications of the equation for the R2P concept and conclude that the above equation fails to produce tangible legal consequences. What remains are its political motivations that sharply depart from the 'higher' ideals permeating the R2P and thus undermine its logic and realization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most states have embraced the emerging Responsibility to Protect norm, which was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2005. R2P obliges states to prevent atrocity crimes within their own borders and not to turn a blind eye when they occur elsewhere. However, R2P's third pillar, which permits UN Security Council-authorized coercive actions, has been controversial. A few states have rejected R2P, fearing that the third pillar might be misused, while others have localized R2P (adapting it to their own preferences) or have sought to modify it globally through feedback in continuing UN discussions. This article explains the range of responses to the third pillar of R2P and explores why states employ different types of feedback, ranging from soft feedback (which seeks to build broader support for R2P) to hard feedback (which seeks to limit R2P). The article concludes that feedback reflects both national strategic concerns and preexisting local norms. Prior normative commitments to human rights and humani-tarianism reduce the incidence of hard feedback whereas normative commitments to anti-imperialism and noninterference increase the likelihood of feedback seeking to constrain R2P States with mixed commitments (e.g., to both human rights and to anti-imperialism) may offer complex, even contradictory, feedback, reflecting a prevailing national norm hierarchy, changes to which could result in changed state responses to R2P. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The politics of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) are interwoven with the ghosts of Rwanda and Srebrenica. Although R2P can clearly be seen as an attempt to legitimate intervening in sovereign states to protect human rights, the post-2001 emphasis of advocates on intervention actually reduced the chances of truly humanitarian action by complicating the calculations of sovereigns faced with unpredictable political risks. As the military dimension to R2P wanes, so the possibility of intervention on a truly humanitarian basis might increase. And thus, the real achievement of the last two decades, embedding the idea of civilian protection as an expectation, comes into view. It is harder than it was to publicly murder your own citizens with impunity. R2P has been a success, we might say, to the extent that it has helped establish the civilian protection principle. But the historical record suggests this emerging norm predates R2P. We can even interpret R2P as a decade-long interlude, a diversion, from the underlying trend toward establishing a post-Cold War norm of preventing atrocities against civilians. What we must not expect, in Syria as in Sri Lanka, is armed intervention in an internal conflict when the United States, China and Russia have vital and conflicting interests at stake. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]